(P.S. If you’d like to download a free list of 1,781 profitable niches click here or the image below)

What You’ll Learn In This Post

Why you should never underestimate the impact of your web hosting service on your business

Why going for a cheap hosting company just to save a few bucks is a bad idea

The key parameters to consider while evaluating a web hosting service

Which hosting service to choose depending on your current business situation

Choosing the Right Web Hosting Service – Why Is It Important?

Yea, why not just host your site with any web hosting service?

All of these people thought the same

If you don’t want to be one of them, choose your web hosting company carefully.

Because the quality of your hosting service has a huge impact on your site’s user experience, content consumption and search rankings.

Here are a few more reasons to make you think

Web Hosting Impacts Your Site’s Search Ranking

A study by Moz found a direct correlation between a site’s search rankings and the TTFB (Time To First Byte) of its web servers.

TTFB is the amount of time a server takes to start serving data to website visitors. This is different from Page Speed.

Slow Servers Hurt User Experience

If your site’s hosted on slow servers, it’ll remain slow no matter how much you optimize its speed. According to KissMetrics, pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load see a drastic increase in page abandonment.

Slower sites have higher bounce rates which result in lower search rankings.

Frequent Down Times Turn Away Visitors

If your web hosting server is down, your website becomes inaccessible to users. If this starts happening too frequently, it can result in loss of potential traffic and sales.

Hackers Can Take Down Insecure Sites

Sites hosted on insecure and poorly protected servers are sitting ducks for hackers and malicious bots.

When your site’s down or you need an urgent software update and no one from your hosting company is willing to understand your problem or lend a helping hand – I’ve experienced this nightmare situation first hand.

Trust me, you don’t want to be there.

WPEngine vs. BlueHost vs. HostGator – Comparing the Giants

All three of these companies have been around for a long time and currently host hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. Server Speed and Response Time

A slow website not only kills user experience but also puts you in Google’s bad books. Which is why server speed and response time should be at the top of your list when evaluating a web hosting service.

Here’s a snapshot of my site’s average response time (hosted on BlueHost) over the last 7 days

Well beyond the recommended limit of 200 ms by Google.

Remember that response time is mostly dependent on server performance and the structure of your site’s database, not on the actual content of your site. But if the initial response time is slow, the overall website speed is likely to be slower.

HostGator isn’t quick either.

In fact, the results are very similar to BlueHost.

The similarity is probably because both BlueHost and HostGator are owned by the same company. Plus, I tested the shared hosting plans for both of them.

Its real-time threat detection mechanism ensures you’re safe from any DDoS and brute force attacks, and also prevents any JavaScript/SQL injection attacks. It also blocks any IPs associated with suspicious past activities like spamming or hacking.

Plus, multiple backups of all your data are always available in just a few clicks.

However, their basic package does not include a CDN.

5. Customer Support

You can easily judge your value for a company by the standard of their customer support.

If they throw you around from one agent to another without understanding your problem, it’s time to leave them for good.

Let me share my experiences

When I initially signed up for a BlueHost account, their staff was pretty good. They offered support through live chat, email tickets, and direct call support.

When my site was infected with malware, their support engineers spent a lot of time with me on live chat and did everything they could to help me.

So I do respect them for that.

But recently, they seem to have outsourced some of their support functions to an offshore company because of which the standards have gone down.

There’s also a pretty long queue on live chat support and sometimes you need to wait for 30-45 minutes before an agent connects with you.

So the standard of their customer support is certainly going downhill.

They claim to offer support via live chat, email and direct calls.

But they don’t seem to listen to their customers.

At least that’s what I experienced.

Stuart also had a pretty rough time dealing with them while NicehHacks was hosted on HostGator with them being unable to tell him why his website was down or how to fix it.

So yea, I’m not a big fan of their support team.

WPEngine claims to be WordPress experts but their support staff certainly needs to improve.

They have a pretty big knowledgebase and help section which answers most questions. But when you need live support, they’re either slow to respond or lack technical expertise.

Their basic package does not include 24/7 phone support or email ticket support which is quite strange and frustrating at the same time.

They need to offer better support against the money they’re charging

6. Pricing

No one likes spending money without getting the right ROI.

Which is why it’s important to take a close look at the pricing packages of these hosting companies.

BlueHost offers three different plans for its shared hosting service.

You can start for as low as $2.95/month if you purchase their “Basic” plan for 3 years.

However, it’s a pretty limited package which doesn’t really offer you much value.

I’d personally recommend going for “Prime” package since it offers you a lot more room to experiment with your niche marketing business, doesn’t cost you too much and also includes SiteBackup Pro as a bonus.

For Serious Niche Marketers

If you’ve already found success with niche marketing, have money to spend and want to focus solely on expanding your business without wasting energy on time-consuming admin tasks, go for WPEngine’s Professional package.

You’re already making money from your niche marketing business and now want to go to higher grounds by scaling your business.

You don’t want to compromise on your site’s speed, performance or security and want to ensure that your business is running at the optimal level.

You also understand that you have limited time and most of it needs to be spent on the core activities of your business, not on administrative tasks.

At the same time, you don’t want to hand over your website to incompetent hosting services that lack the capacity to handle important data.

They’re not just a hosting company, they’re a group of high-skilled professionals who specialize in managing and securely running high-traffic WordPress websites.

You can count on them just like an in-house data and website management department.